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Krieger: Gallo could erase curse of the Big Euro

Danilo Gallinari was 15 the first time Nuggets executive Masai Ujiri saw him play in Europe. His most impressive basketball skill was his handle.

"He's really grown since then," Ujiri said Wednesday just off the Nuggets' practice floor, where the 6-foot-10 Gallinari was finishing his first high-altitude workout. "He's always been a very skilled ball handler. At one point, everybody thought he was going to be a point guard."

I know, I know. You've heard it before. Perhaps no town in America is more skeptical of the big Euro than Denver. There was the Skita disaster, of course, followed by the Darko near-miss a year later when only Joe Dumars and the spirit of giving prevented the Nuggets from selecting two monumental busts in a row.

Gallinari — his Knicks teammates call him Gallo — is already better than those guys, but at 22 he has a chance to be better still. If I say he has the most upside of the four players the Nuggets acquired from the Knicks in the Carmelo Anthony deal, I realize you may roll your eyes. Google "upside" and Nikoloz Tskitishvili and you get 18,400 hits.

But anyone who can play small forward at 6-10, as Gallinari did for the Knicks, has skills that create mismatches, which is what the NBA is all about. Gallinari's ability to set himself apart in this way will ultimately determine how good a trade the Nuggets made.

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By choosing the Knicks' package of young but established players over the Nets' package of draft picks and a young project — or being forced to, depending on your interpretation — the Nuggets took an encouraging gamble.

The Nets deal would have represented blowing up the roster and starting over for the fourth time in 21 years. The Knicks deal doesn't. Gallinari, Wilson Chandler, Raymond Felton and Timofey Mozgov are all serviceable NBA players.

In fact, more than serviceable if you look at their Knicks numbers. Scouts will tell you those numbers were inflated by Mike D'Antoni's fast-paced system — developed in Europe, by the way — but the Nuggets play at a similar pace. In fact, they're the two highest-scoring teams in the NBA.

The Knicks' complementary players also benefited from the presence of Amar'e Stoudemire, a gifted scorer who draws double teams and gets other people open shots. They won't have that luxury in Denver, but they'll still benefit from lots of transition offense.

The conventional NBA wisdom is it's better to be bad than mediocre because mediocrity becomes a vicious cycle of mediocre draft position and mediocre players. Maybe you make the playoffs and maybe you don't, but it never really matters. The Nuggets experienced this toward the end of Doug Moe's run in the 1980s.

According to this school of thought, it's better to get bad, and I mean really bad. Then you get a high draft choice or two, select a young star or two, and off you go. Unfortunately, this usually looks better on the drawing board than in real life. The young stars capable of putting a bad team on their shoulders are just not that common.

If you stumble across a Kevin Durant or Derrick Rose, you look like a genius. If you end up with Tony Battie, Raef LaFrentz and Skita, not to trigger flashbacks, you just stay bad. And staying bad, year after year, is the worst, as longtime Nuggets fans know.

So, just for a change of pace, it's good to see the Nuggets' new front office try to make the best of a bad situation rather than blow it up yet again. Over the next 24 games, they'll be trying to figure out if they have any star potential in their cast of young players.

Of the recent arrivals, Gallinari, the sixth overall pick in 2008, is the most intriguing. For now, he takes nearly half his shots from behind the 3-point line, but his handle and athleticism give him a chance to do more.

"He plays off penetration very well and he sets his game up around the jump shot," said Nuggets president Josh Kroenke, who worked the deal with Ujiri and made the final call to pull the trigger. "When you're 6-10, it's hard to block. If he starts to develop that clever midrange game with shot fakes and fadeaways, he can be a great player."

It's a big if. Countless European big men have been held up as the next Dirk Nowitzki over the years. Still, none of that history dictates who Gallinari can be. He is the potential diamond in the rough here, the player with the potential to make this deal more than a salvage job.

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